For a brief moment, Fallout 76 experienced a mini-Y2K

I don’t know how else to describe this: Fallout 76’s nuke system wasn’t prepared for the year to change and pulled a Y2K.

(Remember: I am a dude writing for a website. I am not savvy with the internal workings of 76’s code. This might have been just a glitch. The following is just a hunch.)

When the new year rolled around, Fallout players found the nuke silos were unavailable. This normally happens after a nuke has been deployed, but what’s interesting is how badly the countdown timer got glitched out.

All three silos were set on a timer for 9,999 hours, meaning the nuke system wouldn’t be available for another 416 days. Furthermore, enemies that normally drop pieces of the launch code were no longer spawning.

My hunch is that the game’s servers did not anticipate the year change to 2019. The game likely maxed out the timers in the hope that 2018 would eventually roll around again. The timer limit is most likely capped at 9,999 hours.

Bethesda announced two days ago that they had applied a hotfix patch to address the nuke silos. Everything is now in working order.

Seeing how the Fallout: 76 launch got botched by bad press and glitches, it’s amazing how many details were overlooekd. In the meantime, the bunkers are prepped and ready for the inevitable Y3K scare.